A funny, wild ride through the Midwestern USA with a struggling music journalist and a merry band of rock and roll malcontents he is assigned to cover.
Darrell Steiner is a middle-aged music journalist caught between his magazine's corporate takeover and a disintegrating marriage. Forced to prove his relevance in an ever-changing music industry, he is assigned to cover a small-time heavy metal band, Numb Skull, for an ill-fated tour through the Midwest. Numb Skull's music is loud, their lyrics pedestrian, and their dreams of the wild rock and roll life drive every decision. Darrell, however, begins to see the assignment as the death knell of his career, helpless on the road while his wife shacks up with his brother.
The makers of Fluffer, the adult energy drink, have gotten into the music business, culminating in the annual Fluffer Music Festival in Chicago. Numb Skull has earned a slot to play at the festival but the band struggles to keep the tour from derailing after a series of mishaps, while Darrell wrestles with his personal and professional lives, finding himself both burdened and sheltered by the road.
Excerpt
I was the lone face on an empty street. I circled the block twice before I found the door I was seeking. Without a visible address, the beige metal door stuck in the wall like a blank placeholder along the cracked sidewalks and pitted brick buildings of Old Town Saginaw, nestled between a pub and tattoo shop, and only entered by those who knew to be there.
I parked my rusty Buick curbside and approached. Although someone was supposed to be manning the door to let me inside, no one was seen. I first knocked with slight reservation, my knuckles casting a hollow sound on the metal that called for more attention than I wanted. There was no response, save for a trio of crows startled out of a nearby dumpster, scraps of stale food clutched in their beaks. They circled overhead, surveying the scene below with beady eyes.
Instead of standing around like a tourist without a map, waiting for someone who may never come, I tried the knob. It turned without resistance.
After stepping into the darkness ahead, a light clicked on from a bare bulb attached to a motion sensor, illuminating the flanking cracked walls and a passage of worn wooden stairs leading upward beyond the light’s reach. I climbed halfway up before the bulb clicked off, returning me to darkness. I paused, waiting for the light to return but nothing happened. I felt as though I was in suspended animation, adrift in an abyss. I dug into my pocket and pulled out my phone, using its faint blue glow to assist with the climb to the second floor.
I arrived in an L-shaped hallway, the walls lined every five feet or so with thick wooden doors, most of them padlocked tight, the gray metal contrasting against the dark wood. I swung my phone left and right, trying to gain some bearings like a spelunker exploring a dark, narrow cave. Muffled voices carried from around a corner and I followed them to the right, coming to a door covered in glossy bumper stickers and faded spray paint, its padlock open and hanging limply from the door’s latch. A crack of light shined under the door, casting a glow across the silver reflective threads on my ratty running shoes.
As I raised my fist to knock on the door, a guitar’s distorted A-chord struck the silence like thunder, the player’s three fingers all jammed onto the second fret in a salute. Then a chunk-chunk-chunk riff of the E-string’s bottom end rattled the walls. My knocking evaporated into the dead wood. A bass guitar sounded with clear, deep tones that caused a thin crackle to erupt on the snare drum, the springs vibrating across the drum head.
I waited until there was a brief lapse in the noise before trying to knock a second time. A man with a shaved head answered, wearing jeans and no shirt, a gleaming smile panned across his stubbly jaws. He was lean and muscular, with tan skin sporting colorful tattoos of various quality and taste. He hopped from one foot to the other as energy raced through his frame like a Tesla coil. Or maybe he had to piss; I couldn’t tell.
He switched a lit cigarette from his right hand to his left to shake mine with a firm grip. “Hey! You’re Dave, right? From Rock Weekly?” His voice was gravelly from smoking and screaming, sweetened with an upper Midwestern twang.
“Darrell, actually. Darrell Steiner.”
“Cool. I’m Chester, the singer for this here musical combo. Come on in.” He opened the door wider.
I entered the large room, its high ceiling supported with heavy wooden beams. The last of the day’s sun shone through three tall, narrow windows facing the street. A thin fog of cigarette smoke wafted above us in astral layers. I looked at the walls while Chester followed behind, as though guiding a museum tour of the band decorations and artifacts I passed.
Half of a wall was dedicated to airbrushed centerfolds ripped from magazines.
“Your groupies?” I asked.
Chester howled so loudly with laughter, I thought he was going to punctuate it with a slap to his knee like a bumpkin. “Hell, yeah, man. We love women. We wanna make music that strippers can do their thing to. You know...” He began gyrating his hips while beat-boxing slow and funky, dry-humping the stale air through faded denim jeans, a beer bottle plucked from the top of a nearby amplifier clenched in fist. “Let’s just say it’s always a pleasure to hear our music in the strip clubs.”
I was then introduced to the three other members of Numb Skull. Brian, the guitarist, was lanky and had long dirty-blond hair that obscured his face whenever he looked down, which was most of the time. He sat in a nearby chair and threaded a new string onto a glossy black guitar. His mop nodded to me as I passed while he continued his delicate task, his tongue placed firmly between lips in concentration.
Anton had a shiny bald head and dark-brown goatee. He wore a Black Flag t-shirt and leather wristbands around both wrists, as though his bass guitar was a battle axe. His steely gaze brought to mind the evil intensity of Ming the Merciless, though he was quick with a wide white smile when jokes were tossed around. Numb Skull’s bio claimed that Anton had founded Numb Skull with Chester, acting as the cautious, grounded yin to Chester’s capricious yang. The two were the backbone of the band and would likely see Numb Skull through to the bitter end. Their easy collaboration had bonded them as brothers and as a consequence, they fought constantly.
The drummer, Jimmy, was the youngest, demonstrated by a baby face with high cheeks that begged to be pinched by a fawning old lady. Jimmy was charismatic but lacked Chester’s cartoony captivation. He smiled as he patiently assembled his massive drum kit, one piece at a time. He gave off the energy of a teenager who had just gotten through a tavern door with a fake ID. And maybe he did, being a hazy shade of twenty.
“This is the guy who’s following us around for Rock Weekly,” said Chester, propping me up like a display.
I nodded as I met each of them, keeping the polite distance of a new acquaintance. I’d seen most of this before. They were cookie-cutter musicians, each a distinct archetype that begged for originality but really screamed a desire for acceptance. Structured day jobs didn’t cater to their freewheeling needs. The rigors of academia required stumbling through too many fifty-cent words. Their lack of discipline would have them fleeing from army boot camp like escaping convicts. Up to this point in their lives, they had stuck with the path of least resistance, drifting towards a complacent compromise with life’s challenges, yet determined to stick with their dreams as they cultivated their image as carefully as a princess in her boudoir.
Neither large or small labels had shown much interest in Numb Skull, but there was a new game in town: corporate sponsorship and their music label imprints. The company that made the adult energy drink, Fluffer (“It Keeps You Up”), was developing new artists for their burgeoning record label, Fluffer Records. They underwrote tours, funded recording time, and invited their artists to play at an annual festival, The Fluffer Fest. Fluffer became such a threat to the competitive status quo that major labels would prevent their own artists from performing at the festival from time to time, hurting themselves and their artists in the process. Large shows like the Fluffer Fest brought people to the bands, giving them more exposure than they would get anywhere else, even under the guidance of more professional, established outfits.
Fluffer had somehow discovered Numb Skull lurking in the dark recesses of the internet and wanted to hear more. The Vice President of Midwest Music Operations for Fluffer Records had sent the band a letter on thick bond paper to invite them to play the next festival and discuss Numb Skull becoming one of Fluffer’s bands. In response, Chester cobbled together a small tour around the festival for Numb Skull and prepared to stir up some dust.
As they strapped on their gear and began to tune up, I sat in an open lounge a few feet away, with fake wooden chairs stripped from a doctor’s waiting room and a coffee table stacked high with dog-eared Playboys and tattoo magazines taken from the shop a floor below.
Instead of perusing the pages of silicone-queens, I watched a daddy longlegs hobble across the thick, white carpet turned grey with cigarette ash. As they tossed around ideas for the tour’s set list, I kept myself occupied by reading some letters taped to the wall nearby: official Numb Skull correspondence. The first was a gushing letter from a fan in Kentucky, who wrote in rough longhand that he had “never heard nothing so awesome before,” humbly asking if they would play at his wedding “if it’s cool with my fiancé.” The second was cut out of the letters section of People magazine, complaining to the surely-baffled editor of their lack of heavy metal coverage in their music section. Respectfully submitted, Chester Drawers of Numb Skull.
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